The origins of the Society had its foundations on a previous organization, The Friends of the People (French: Société des Amis du Peuple)'.
The SDH was modelled on another French secret Society, the Charbonnerie, organised in small groups of less than twenty members, each given names that evoked Jacobin tradition: 'Robespierre', 'Marat', 'Babeuf', 'Louvel', 'Blackjack January', 'War with the castles', 'Washington', etc.
Moderates included Antoine Richard du Cantal, the German writer Georg Büchner (author of Woyzeck, amongst other works),[7] although this is not proven.
But soon the radical elements gained the upper hand and published a manifesto on "Société des droits de l'homme" in the journal La Tribune on October 22, 1833, demanding a return to a government along Jacobin principles: strict secularity; economic and educational leadership of the state, strict limitation of private property; nationalization and planning of the economy; etc.
In 1834, Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure a lawyer and member of the Society associated the three famous terms "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" together and published it in the Revue Républicaine which he edited: "Any man aspires to liberty, to equality, but he can not achieve it without the assistance of other men, without fraternity.
In April 1834, there were serious disturbances broke out in Paris following the passing of a law to curtail the activities of the Republican Society of Human Rights (changing the allowed group sizes) which spread to Lyons.
The profits were to promote freedom of the press and defrayed legal costs of a lawsuit against the satirical, politically progressive journal Le Charivari to which Daumier contributed regularly.
[12] On July 28, 1835, a Corsican member of the Society Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, together with two compatriots, attempted to assassinate King Louis Philippe I using an "infernal machine" consisting of 20 gun-barrels bound and detonated together.